Worth pondering

The always mahvelous Star A. Decise of The Enigmatic Paradox shares a few well-chosen words about the utter failure of Bush's "Cowboy Diplomacy" - and fires a well-deserved shot across the bow of an inexplicably fawning press. Ms. Star observes:

Like an old married couple who complete each other's sentences, two of the major pillars of the foreign policy press establishment suddenly are singing hosannas to a kinder, gentler, more mature Bush approach to foreign affairs.

But with militias turning the streets of Iraq's major cities into free fire zones, it seems like one more example of the major media's institutional inability to speak truth to power and their willing suspension of critical thinking.

Bullseye.

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As if to further confirm the "media lapdog" aspect of Ms. Star's cogent argument, check out this "news analysis" by the New York Times' David Sanger. In an article designed, apparently, to reassure the nation that the excesses of the Bush Administration are finally being reined in by new Congressional legislation and Supreme Court rulings, Sanger writes:

Twice in the past few weeks, President Bush has been forced to negotiate with Congress over a subject that until recently he has insisted was nonnegotiable: his powers as commander in chief in prosecuting what he often calls "a new kind of war"...

The developments amount to a tactical retreat for a White House that has aggressively asserted that new kinds of wars call for a restoration of presidential powers of a kind unseen since Abraham Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus during the Civil War...

[I]t has begun to concede... that the system it constructed cannot bear legal scrutiny and that Congress will have to play a role in fixing the problem. That alone is a major change, one Mr. Bush would have considered anathema just months ago.

Too bad that Sanger forgot to mention in his little "analysis" that the White House is already preparing to dance around the Gitmo ruling - with the help of its usual compliant allies in Washington - and the sham Congressional "oversight" proposed by Arlen Specter "makes it optional for Bush to follow the law, while rewarding him for illegal conduct."

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Courtesy of OpEdNews, here's another small gem from freelance writer Lynne Glasner, on roast pig, World War III, and paranoid security measures more befitting of a despised despot than the leader of the "free" world. Ms. Glasner notes:

Less than ten days after celebrating our own 'rockets red glare,' the Middle East is about to go up in flames. Israel and Lebanon are hurling rockets at each other - testing one another's strength and resolve. Syria is contemplating its response. Iran will fuel the flames from the sidelines, for now, waiting for the right moment to jump in. Iraq deteriorates further every day, along with Afghanistan. It feels like we're on the eve of destruction, like the wild fires that burn in the Canadian west, they are quelled only to ignite again elsewhere in the heat of summer, in the arid climate that has been stripped of civility...

All this while Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel break bread and eat roast pig. The irony couldn't be more startling. As the two leaders of the West toast each other's health and answer brief softball questions, the Washington Post reports that Bush keeps his focus on the roast.

(Hat tip to artist and friend Ivan Sherman)

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And James Raven at The Psychotic Patriot posts this angry, brutal piece on Abeer Qasim Hamza al Janabi, the adolescent raped and murdered by American troops in Iraq four months ago. Mr Raven fumes:

Abeer Qasim Hamza al Janabi

This is her name. Her life and death have a larger purpose now, more than the hundreds of thousands of her neighbors killed by American bombs and white phosphorus and rifle bullets and missiles and secretly-tested weapons we can't even imagine. This little girl did nothing to George Bush. No one in her country did anything to George Bush. But he sent too few troops with too little cultural training back into Iraq too many times, adding mentally ill people to the rosters, lowering the bar to make quotas, making the military a gold mine for racist hate groups. She now is a part of the terrible legacy of Bush's political game, her rape and murder worth how many votes?

Even before I knew her name, James, I couldn't have agreed more.